Before Christmas: When Darkness Taught Us to Gather

When we trace the holiday season back far enough—not through shopping flyers or Victorian nostalgia, but through language—we find something that illuminates beyond the fluorescence of red-and-green LEDs.

Christmas is actually a late addition to the human calendar, a medieval English blending of Cristes mæsse, “the mass of Christ.” Yet the season it names is far older than the word, older than the faith it represents, older than the societies that eventually wrapped it in story and ceremony. 

Its deepest root isn’t linguistic at all but astronomical: the winter solstice—the long night when the sun pauses, gathers itself, and begins its slow return. For cultures that lived close to the land, this shift wasn’t abstract. It shaped how people moved, how they rested, how they prepared their minds and bodies for the long stretch ahead. 

The solstice became a kind of teacher. Not because anyone declared a holiday, but because darkness demanded a response, and people learned to meet it with one another. Across centuries and continents, the ethic was surprisingly consistent: Winter was a time of rest—of allowing the land to sleep and, in turn, permitting ourselves a rare stillness. 

Communities gathered not for spectacle but because survival, emotional or otherwise, was never meant to be solitary. Food harvested in warmer months was shared so no one fell through the cracks. Elders were tended to. Children were reminded that they belonged. 

Reflection came naturally in the long dark—an inward turn toward the year just lived, the lessons absorbed, the intentions quietly forming for the year to come. 

Gratitude, too, found its place: thanks for the harvest, for the warmth that remained, for the sun’s inevitable return. Offerings were made not out of superstition but out of recognition that life is a web of reciprocity, and us humans are only one part of it.

And, of course, there was hope; the small, stubborn kind. Every solstice marked the moment when light began to lengthen again, when the sun, however faintly, tipped back toward the world. It was a reminder that darkness is never the whole story.

So the holiday we now call Christmas—bright, familiar, overwhelming, beloved—rests atop a season already shaped by these instincts: to rest when the world slows, to gather when the cold presses in, to reflect, to give thanks, to trust that renewal is on its way. 

December still arrives with its theatrical flourish—lights blinking on porches, music insisting on cheerfulness from every direction. But beneath that performance, the older rhythm is still there: the pull toward warmth, the drift into kitchens, the quiet recognition that midwinter has always been less about obligation and more about response.

Christmas didn’t invent the season. It found its place inside a season that was already full—full of meaning and memory, full of the human need to seek and appreciate light precisely when it seems furthest from reach.

I will preface this is not an anti-capitalist account of seasonal etymology; we have enough of those. I usually am the first to bristle at the consumerist frenzy of the holidays; the way marketing slips under our skin, the way we buy our way toward meaning. But if I’m honest, it also makes perfect sense. 

Winter is slow, cold, and lonely by design, and of course we overcorrect. Of course we throw ourselves into brightness and noise and gatherings that require more energy than we have. The season pulls us toward each other, even knowing the chaos it demands, and there’s something strangely beautiful in that. 

Yes, the structure is exploitative; yes, the machine hums a little too loudly. But beneath it is a very old human instinct: to chase warmth in the longest night, to insist on joy in a season that could have swallowed us whole. 

So where did it start? 

The Solstice Was the First Story

Long before calendars were standardized or theology was written down, people were watching the sky.

The solstice announced itself without explanation as the longest night; the moment when winter seemed to swallow the world whole. And then, almost imperceptibly, it stepped back.

Light lengthened again. Life had something to move toward.

Cultures then turned this cosmic fact into meaning.

Northern Europe: Yule and the Unfinished Night

Journey back into early Germanic and Norse worlds and you meet Yule—a season, not a date, thick with smoke and superstition. 

Fires were kept alive through nights that seemed unwilling to end. Evergreen boughs were brought indoors as proof that life had not surrendered entirely. Feasts were held not from abundance but from defiance: share now, or what is the point of seeing spring?

The old sun was understood to die and the new to be born, marking the solstice as a moment of cosmic renewal in Germanic belief. Ancestors were invoked through blót rites to secure protection for the coming year. And the Wild Hunt—rooted in early Germanic and later Norse tradition—was imagined coursing across the sky; its tumult explaining winter’s fierce, wandering winds.

When Christianity arrived, it stepped quietly into this setting.

The Yule tree became the Christmas tree. The log stayed. Even the twelve-day stretch of celebration found its way into Christian liturgy. 

The old roots simply grew in a new direction.

The Roman World: Saturnalia and the Backwards Week

Rome took a different approach, as they usually did. 

During Saturnalia, Romans temporarily suspended social order—slaves could dine with masters, people spoke more freely than was normally advisable, and small gifts passed through the city like tokens of temporary equality. Evergreen wreaths and candlelit feasts gave winter a softer edge. 

The whole week became a ritualized inversion of Roman seriousness, complete with public banquets and a mock sovereign chosen to preside over the chaos. It was Rome’s way of acknowledging that even an empire needed, occasionally, to loosen its grip.

Thus, when Christian leaders later placed the Nativity (the birth of Jesus) in late December, they were fitting it into a season already shaped by communal festivity, not imposing celebration onto an otherwise empty month.

Persia: Shab-e Yalda and the Long Vigil

In ancient Persia, the solstice carried a quieter gravity. 

Shab-e Yalda—the Night of Birth—celebrates the moment Mithra, the force of light and covenant, entered the world. Families gathered to stay awake through the night, breaking open pomegranates, reading poems that reached into the marrow of winter, waiting for darkness to loosen its grip.

This wasn’t escape from the night; it was attendance.

East Asia: Dongzhi and the Return of Balance

Across China, Korea, and Japan, Dongzhi marks the turning of the year’s cosmic energy. Yin, having reached its deepest point, begins to lift; yang begins to rise. Families gather for warm, round foods symbolizing unity and continuity. Ancestors are honoured, harmony reaffirmed.

Dongzhi isn’t a festive explosion so much as a nod to the universe’s quiet recalibration.

Indigenous North America: Ceremony as Continuity

For many Indigenous cultures, the solstice is not an isolated event but a relational moment—a renewal of connection between people, land, sky, and the unseen. 

Among the Hopi and Pueblo peoples, Soyal marks the return of the Kachina spirits, with fires lit and prayer sticks crafted to invite the sun back through ceremony rather than metaphor. 

The Haudenosaunee begin their new spiritual cycle by stirring the ashes of last year’s fires, a gesture that reaffirms continuity and gratitude. The Anishinaabe honour the Manitous whose presence does not fade with the waning light. Inuit communities, living in the long polar dark with a kind of endurance most of us only theorize, maintain rituals that keep communal life intact when the world outside withdraws.

And for those of us living in places like Niagara—where Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe nations have shaped the land far longer than the borders that surround it—these traditions are not distant history. They are part of the ground we stand on, part of the winter ethos woven into this region long before our modern celebrations. 

The idea that winter is something faced together or not at all is as true here as anywhere: a quiet inheritance from cultures that understood this landscape far better than we do.

Mesopotamia and the Slavic Lands: The Sun’s Death and Return

In ancient Mesopotamia, Zagmuk reenacted the yearly struggle between chaos and order at midwinter—a cosmic symmetry with the dark.

In the Slavic world, Korochun and Koliada told the story of the old sun dying and the young sun being born. Villagers traveled door to door singing blessings, a custom so widespread that later European caroling is almost certainly descended from it.

Everywhere, the narrative is the same: winter presses, people gather, light returns.

Christianity: A Story Set into an Old Framework

With no scriptural date to follow, early Christians looked to a calendar already crowded with solstice rites—festivals of returning light, feasting, and divine renewal from Rome to the Germanic north. The symbolism aligned so naturally with Christian theology that December was less a choice than an inevitability. Christmas didn’t overwrite midwinter tradition; it layered itself onto meanings centuries older.

As Christianity settled into the older midwinter frame, it shaped certain traditions of its own and bent others in ways that made sense to the people already living across the Mediterranean world, the Roman provinces, and the northern European territories it was slowly moving into. 

The Nativity story became the season’s grounding narrative—simple, stark, strangely intimate. Advent offered a slow, almost meditative way of moving through the dark weeks before it. Midnight services gathered communities at the precise moment the returning light felt most symbolic. And the older customs didn’t vanish; they shifted. 

Evergreens took on the language of eternal life, gift-giving was recast through the Magi’s journey, and the familiar winter feast found new resonance in the hospitality surrounding Christ’s birth. 

Christianity didn’t erase what came before—it wove its theology into gestures people already trusted, creating a season that feels layered because it is layered, and still a little mysterious even after centuries of repetition.

Then Modernity Arrived, Loud and Busy; new Christmas

Centuries later, industrial modernity arrived and, with its usual confidence, refashioned the season into something far more ambitious than the old solstice rites ever asked of it. Dickens handed the holiday a new emotional script—one perfectly suited to an age wrestling with factories, poverty, and a growing need for moral sentiment dressed as entertainment. 

Department stores quickly recognized December as fertile ground for commerce, expanding winter markets into full-scale seasonal economies. Santa, once a patchwork of regional figures, was standardized into a benevolent mascot of consumption; polished until he fit neatly into advertisements that learned to sentimentalize their own sales pitches. Lights spread across cities, not as small defiances of darkness but as coordinated displays of prosperity.

None of this is malicious; it’s simply the logic of the era asserting itself. Every age translates the old midwinter instinct through its own vocabulary, and ours happens to speak in a frantic material optimism. 

The solstice impulse (light, warmth, sustenance, togetherness) didn’t disappear. It just learned to express itself through the channels our culture offers: flashy ornaments, shopping rituals, gifts swallowing affection. What once took the form of feasts and fires now reappears as overflowing malls, limited-time sales, plastic abundance, and a kind of seasonal performance anxiety that feels strangely archaic.

This is simply what our society does with meaning: it turns it into objects, into things we can buy or wrap or quantify, because that is the grammar of our era. 

It’s gluttonous at times, yes, even chaotic, but it’s also recognizably human—our contemporary way of insisting that winter won’t swallow us. That we’re still here, still gathering, still capable of exuberance in the long, cold dark. 

Underneath the neon and the noise, the old instinct is doing what it has always done, just wearing a form that makes sense (to be sold) to us now.

A Gentle Reminder

The point, I think, isn’t to idealize the past or to scold the present. The season has always been a mosaic—faith layered on folklore layered on necessity. 

We all know the real warmth of midwinter has never come from the over-commercialized spectacle, or the exhausting pursuit of “getting it right.” It has come from us—however we manage to gather, no matter how imperfectly the year has treated us. 

And we all know this, of course. Yet Hollywood trots out the same lesson every December, wraps it in sentiment, and we nod along as though hearing something new. Then we rush headlong into the very chaos we swore we’d resist, only to be startled, again, by those few quiet moments that reveal what the season actually feels like when it finally exhales.

Whatever the formula, the result remains to nudge us into noticing the small, ordinary gratitudes we overlook all year. And those tiny recognitions grow into something resembling warmth, or care, or the faint beginnings of compassion for the year ahead. 

Whether it succeeds is another matter but the hope, at least, feels honest. And for all this, I am grateful. 

Things like food being placed on the table then take on more meaning. Not because of what’s on the plate, but because of the hands that pass the food. The table becomes a medium for the exchange that is the uncomplicated refusal to let winter feel too empty. 

Light, too, then shows up in ways no decoration can imitate—the look on someone’s face when they walk into a room where they’re wanted, the laughter that arrives without being summoned, the sense of exhalation among people who know your history and don’t need you to perform it. 

Warmth isn’t just temperature; it’s the ease of being understood, the coat handed to someone who forgot theirs, the unspoken gestures that say oh so warmly; you’re not alone in this season.

And sustenance is more than food. It’s presence, even brief presence. It’s seeing your elders breathe easier for an evening, smiling down on the legacy they created. It’s children running through rooms like trails of exuberance flashing. It’s the reminder, however fleeting, that you exist with others in ways you don’t always pause to acknowledge.

Unfortunately, not everyone reaches the season with these comforts. Some don’t have the warmth or the table or the cluster of familiar voices. Some face winter stripped down to its hardest edges. 

And Midwinter, long before Christmas, held an ethic for moments like this: a recognition that light and warmth were meant to be shared. Because survival, in any sense, was never an individual achievement.

So the heart of the season isn’t a moral lifted from a movie or a nostalgic glow we briefly remember and quickly misplace. It’s the quiet gratitude that appears when the world finally slows: the relief of finding one another, even briefly, in the dark. And the old, steady promise that the light will return, and that—with some care—we will, too.

And I think this is where most of us eventually arrive at the end of our celebrations: a kind of softened awareness, a moment of gratitude, a renewed sense of togetherness. So here’s to figuring it out alongside one another this holiday, and to staying present for those who may not have anyone nearby to help with the warmth or the light they deserve. It’s within this ethic, more than anywhere else, that the season grows tallest and truest.

Peace, love and more soul, always. 

Happy Holidays. 

the desire for warmth as you watch the light slip away into the long dark. many Christmas histories started in stories like these.